1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to medical imaging. More particularly, this invention relates to reconstruction of an anatomic structure from relatively sparse data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Medical catheterizations are routinely carried out today, for example, in cases of cardiac arrhythmias, such as atrial fibrillation, which occur when regions of cardiac tissue abnormally conduct electric signals to adjacent tissue, thereby disrupting the normal cardiac cycle and causing asynchronous rhythm. Procedures for treating arrhythmia include surgically disrupting the origin of the signals causing the arrhythmia, as well as disrupting the conducting pathway for such signals. By selectively ablating cardiac tissue by application of energy, e.g., radiofrequency energy via a catheter, it is sometimes possible to cease or modify the propagation of unwanted electrical signals from one portion of the heart to another. The ablation process destroys the unwanted electrical pathways by formation of non-conducting lesions. It is desirable in such procedures to provide a convenient representations of the cardiac anatomy to the operator.
For example, the left atrium is a complicated 3-dimensional structure, the walls of which have dimensions, which differ from person to person, although all left atria have the same underlying shape. The left atrium can be divided into a number of substructures, such as the pulmonary vein, the mitral or bicuspid valve and the septum, which are conceptually easy to identify. The sub-structures also typically differ from person to person, but as for the overall left atrium, each substructure has the same underlying shape. In addition, a given substructure has the same relationship to the other substructures of the heart, regardless of the individual differences in shapes of the substructures.